Review: Dada Masilo’s HAMLET, Sadler’s Wells ★★★½

Dada Masilo's Hamlet Image Credit Lauge Sorenson

Masilo’s Final Statement, Fiercely Alive

There is a particular shared grief that sits in a theatre when the work on stage is also a farewell. Dada Masilo died on 29 December 2024, aged just 39, only months after receiving a lifetime achievement award in Positano and just as HAMLET was beginning to find its international audience. She had trained from the age of eleven at The Dance Factory in Johannesburg, the company that bears her name tonight, and had gone on to reshape classical repertoire: Swan Lake, Carmen, Giselle, The Rite of Spring, all in ways that were wholly and unmistakably her own: fast, grounded, fiercely alive. Throughout her career, she was explicit that she was not interested in what she once called being “a body in space.” She wanted people to feel. Her project was always, in part, a dismantling of European romantic ballet’s tendency to aestheticise suffering rather than confront it. This is her last work, and the company has chosen, rightly, to keep it breathing. As producer Suzette Le Sueur, who worked alongside Masilo for over twenty years, has said simply: the best tribute is to keep the work alive. The production has been further developed in 2026 by Le Sueur and associate choreographer Llewellyn Mnguni, who also takes the role of Gertrude.

It is worth knowing, before the lights go down, that Masilo had visited Ophelia‘s territory before. Her 2011 piece The Bitter End of Rosemary was also rooted in Ophelia‘s perspective, and there is a sense in HAMLET that she was returning to complete something. This version, told almost entirely through dance, places Ophelia at its centre: it is through her eyes that we watch the court of Denmark consume itself, and it is her experience of misogyny, manipulation and erasure that the choreography interrogates. Shakespeare’s text is largely absent, though the piece opens with a single spoken delivery of “To be or not to be,” a deliberate anchoring before language is released and the body takes over.

The choreographic vocabulary Masilo built over her career is richly present here. Ballet’s demand for centredness and vertical control is constantly subverted: dancers lean far into and away from the vertical, shoulders carry enormous expressive weight, and there is a fluidity of rotation, a looseness in the spine and suppleness in the limbs, that draws richly on African dance traditions, weaving them into and against the European ballet vocabulary. Bare feet ground the work throughout. Voices are used not as song exactly, but as sound: breath, laughter, sharp percussive utterances that punctuate the movement.

The original score by Thuthuka Sibisi, with Leroy Mpholo, Ann Masina and Mpho Mothiba, drives the piece forward with considerable force. At various times we hear discordant sounds, violin, organs, African songs, whistles. There is an almost constant drum beat rhythm. When it is not there, we notice.

There are sequences of real brilliance. The comic players bring sharp physical humour, and the projections, shifting between castle walls, a more structured grid, and in the finale a searing bowl of blood-red light, are beautifully used. Costume is deployed with flair: huge skirts sweep and billow in ways that recall flamenco, and there are moments of belly dance vocabulary that remind you how deliberately Masilo refused to be confined by any single tradition.

And yet, for me, the emotional arc did not quite resolve. Ophelia has her descent into madness and her death, but both arrive and pass swiftly before the court’s catastrophe overwhelms everything. London audiences who saw Francesca Mills‘ searingly powerful Ophelia at the National earlier this year will arrive primed to feel that loss deeply, and may find, as I did, that the choreography moves on before there has been time to grieve alongside her. It is possible, of course, that this is precisely the point. If Masilo‘s wants us to take women’s suffering seriously, then perhaps an Ophelia who is swallowed up and forgotten by the court around her is exactly what she intended.

After her death, what the finale delivers is genuinely extraordinary. This is where the piece finds its most peril: a building wall of sound, a relay of rotations that starts with clinking glasses and gathers into something close to frenzy, bodies spent and collapsing, and the audience spent alongside them. The stage is drenched in blood red, light and projection combining until there is nothing else, and the effect is visceral and unforgettable. It is this and some of the the smaller moments that stay longest: Hamlet crossing the stage to embrace Ophelia, and her shuddering, more than once, in small and precise refusals.

Dada Masilo said she made work because she wanted people to feel something. On that measure, HAMLET succeeds. You leave spent, moved, and thinking about power and women and what gets left behind. That is no small thing.

The finale is where the piece finds its most peril: a building wall of sound, a relay of rotations that gathers into something close to frenzy, bodies spent and collapsing, and the audience spent alongside them

[Thank you to Sadler’s Wells for a gifted ticket for an honest review.]

Article images: Lauge Sorenson

RUNNING TIME: 1 hour, no interval